Defectors: ISIS is killing Muslims, not protecting them
Updated 1004 GMT (1704 HKT) September 21, 2015
Much has been written about the young men and women who join the Islamic State. We are familiar with their biographies and pathways, backgrounds and motivations.
But virtually nothing is known about those who quit: the "defectors" who didn't like what they saw, abandoned their comrades and fled the Islamic State. Yet their stories could be key to stopping the flow of foreign fighters, countering the group's propaganda and exposing its lies and hypocrisy.
For a short paper, I collected all published stories about people who have left the Islamic State and spoken about their defection. I discovered a total of 58 -- a sizable number but probably only a fraction of those who are disillusioned or ready to leave.
They are a new and growing phenomenon. Of the 58 cases, nearly two thirds of the defections took place in the year 2015. One third happened during the summer months alone.The township club leading the charge against racism in South African rugby
As the Sprinkboks come under fire for their nearly all-white World Cup team, Daily Maverick visits an academy taking racial equality into its own hands
When a key player had his boots stolen on the morning of two big matches, Twitter came to the team’s rescue with a concerned follower dropping off a pair of shoes as the first game was about to start.
“People on social media were great when our coaches got robbed,” says Murray Ingram, who runs a rugby academy in Khayelitsha township outside Cape Town. “We asked people to help us out and we quickly raised the funds.”
Ingram and his partner Yanga Qinga founded the academy, Connect, more than five years ago to teach local children to play rugby and help them participate in competitive games.
The pair have watched the debate about the racial composition of the Springbok rugby squad participating in the 2015 World Cup with interest, and laugh at suggestions that black children are not interested in the sport.
In Egypt, family of those 'accidentally' killed speak out
Egyptian security forces last week killed a group of tourists they say they mistook for militants in the desert. One of those killed was an Egyptian tour guide. DW spoke to his family.
At first, Nasser Fathy says, he thought his friend Atef was playing a cruel, stupid prank on him: It was late in the afternoon on Sunday, September 13, when his phone rang. He was calling, Atef said, to offer his condolences: "Your brother has died."
There had been a deadly attack on a convoy of tourists who had stopped for lunch, he told him, not far from the hotel in the Western Desert, a region popular with tourists, where he works.
"I don't know who the attackers are," Fathy's friend continued, "could be the army, could be terrorists. They don't know yet." But he did know one thing for sure: That Nasser Fathy's younger brother Mohamed Awwad, an experienced tour guide, was part of the group - and that he was dead. He had seen his corpse, he told Fathy.
'We can hear them screaming': soldiers told to ignore paedophilia by Afghan allies
Joseph Goldstein
Kabul, Afghanistan: In his last phone call home, Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley Jr told his father what was troubling him: from his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.
"At night we can hear them screaming, but we're not allowed to do anything about it," the Marine's father, Gregory Buckley Sr, recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors.
"My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it's their culture."
Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally "boy play" and United States soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene - not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.Cure for broken metropolises: the insta-city
Teeming with problems, cities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East try a new approach – building private cities from scratch.
LAGOS, NIGERIA — From above, it seems Africa’s largest city is sprouting a tail.
It began appearing in 2008, and grew slowly at first – the narrow stretch of beach creeping southward from the bottom of Lagos’s upscale Victoria Island, forming a jagged appendage of sand where once there was only ocean. But by 2013, nearly 2 square miles had been reclaimed from the sea, and the island had quietly ballooned to nearly twice its original size.
But this tail dangling from the edge of Lagos is not simply a bold land reclamation effort. It is also the site of perhaps the continent’s most ambitious construction project, a futuristic private metropolis called Eko Atlantic. When it is complete, developers promise a city filled with high-rise glass condos and tree-lined marinas, where a quarter-million Nigerians will live in quiet, untroubled luxury.Refugees spurn France in search for better life
By Fran Blandy4 hours ago
They dream of a better life in Germany, Sweden or Holland, but one country appears glaringly absent from the lips of refugees on their arduous journey to Europe: France.
So why are refugees skirting Europe's second largest economy, once seen as the promised land for asylum-seekers?
"France is not good for my future, and on top of that it doesn't have the reputation of easily giving a residence permit," said Edward, a 24-year-old from Baghdad waiting in Stockholm for a boat to Finland.
Word has spread that going to France means months without a roof over their heads, wading through French bureaucracy and dealing with disobliging civil servants who don't speak English.
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